I. THE LETTERS OF EDWARD FITZGERALD, Quarterly Review, III. THE CHANNEL ISLANDS. By Charles Temple Bar, Gentleman's Magazine, Cornhill Magazine, V. MATTHEW PRIOR. By Edward Manson, VII. A TRIP TO MALTA AND BACK, Good Words, A MASTERLESS MAID, NATURA MEDICATRIX, POETRY. 770 IN MEMORIAM, PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY THE LIVING AGE COMPANY, BOSTON. 770 TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. FOR SIX DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made payable to the order of the LIVING AGE CO. Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 15 cents. But take them not, O peevish child, Thy sick distemperature of brain, As though the mountains had been piled To minister to human pain; As though the life of air and sun, Water and wind and mist and snow, Were phantasms of a life that's done And vanished in the long ago; As though no power of joy endowed Them, and no sense for love or light; As though a cloud possessed the cloud, And night were at the heart of night. But seek them for themselves, for what In veritable deed they are. That they assuage thy soul is naught; There's more than starlight in the star. There's more than flesh about thy bones, And more than blood compels thy heart. Ay, in thy roaring city's stones A spirit and a breath have part! And ere of Nature thou wouldst reap A boon, be her instruction known"My heart of peace for those I keep Who bring a peace that is their own." Speaker. AMBROSE BENNETT. THE LETTERS OF EDWARD FITZGERALD 1 When Edward FitzGerald died in June, 1883, only a few people had even heard his name. Indeed the public at large had not had much chance of hearing it. He had published very little; and the private, or semi-private, method of publication he adopted, his retiring temper, which led him, as some one said, to take "more pains to avoid fame than others do to seek it," the subjects his works dealt with, remote from most men's reading, and appealing only to the finer and more curious part of the small public which reads-all bined to keep him quite unknown. Nor could the dedication of Tennyson's "Tiresias," written just before FitzGerald died, but, as the Epilogue shows, not published till after his death, do much to dissipate this obscurity. In spite of all its cordial friendliness,-in spite of its generous praise of his From The Quarterly Review. great novelists than in actual life. No figure could stand out more curiously in our modern English world. Nothing is more old-fashioned nowadays than leisure, and FitzGerald was at leisure all his days. Nor could anything be more old-fashioned than his use of it. His taste was all for old books and old friends, familiar jokes and familiar places. He clung all his life to the dull' and dirty Suffolk country in which he was born, just as, at the end of his life, he returned every year, with the return of spring, to his dearly loved Madame de Sévigné. The altars of our great modern idols, bustle and publicity, received no sacrifices from him. Perfectly regardless of time and money and fashion, he stalked his native roads in a strange costume,-in which, however, it is said, he never ceased to have an indefinable look of the hidalgo about him, or pottered in his boat on the sluggish Deben, asking children odd questions, or looking over Crabbe or Calderon. He had a just horror of clever people, and much preferred the stupidity of country folks to the "impudence of Londoners." His time was largely passed with his social inferiors, com golden Eastern lay, Than which I know no version done In English more divinely well; the tribute scarcely widened the circle of those who knew FitzGerald. The memory of many disappointments is apt to keep the judicious reader from meddling with translations of great poems, and Persian literature is to most men a new field, into which they are shy to break. Tennyson's lines, moreover, because of their enthusiasm, created a suspicion of the partiality of old friendship, and, above all, "Omar Khayyam" was anything but easy to obtain. So it was that FitzGerald died almost unknown. And yet he was not only a personality, but a very delightful per sonality. He went his own way from the beginning and lived his own life, and the result was an original creation, such as we look rather to find in the 11. Letters and Literary Remains of Edward FitzGerald. Edited by William Aldis Wright. Three Vols. London, 1889. 2. Letters of Edward FitzGerald. Edited by William Aldis Wright. Two Vols. London, 1894. with the boys who read to him when his eyes began to fail, and who must have been bewildered by his strange sayings and doings; with the bookseller for whose sake he bought books he did not want; or with the "hero" fisherman of Lowestoft who, "great man" as he was, had a weakness which he could not conquer, and proved, as far as money went, one of FitzGerald's bad speculations. Not that that would have troubled FitzGerald; his generosity was like everything else about him, of the old-fashioned sort, which, though probably not the wisest, is at least the prettiest; free and open, careless of distant results, and very direct and personal in its application. We imagine it to be very possible that he never gave a guinea to a charitable society in his life, but very certain that he gave a great many to unfortunate individuals 3. Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny With whom he came into contact. Kemble. 1871-1883. Edited by William Aldis Altogether it was a strange existence, with something about it that may well make us pause in our fussy self-impor- | 1853, though he often shifted his quar- ters, he lived mainly in a thatched cot- The little he wrote was all published anonymously, except "Six Dramas of Calderon" in 1853. He prefixed a memoir to an edition of the poems of his friend, Bernard Barton, the Quaker 1849. Two poet of Woodbridge, in years later, he printed the remarkable dialogue "Euphranor." "Polonius" appeared in 1852; a rendering of the "Agamemnon," parts of which are unequalled, was published in 1876; and four editions of his translation of "Omar Khayyam" came out before his death, the first appearing in 1859, with The other Persian translations were A life like FitzGerald's has no story. left in manuscript and only appeared He was born at Bredfield, near Wood- in Mr. Aldis Wright's edition of his bridge, in 1809. The chief recollection "Literary Remains," 1889. He was a man of many and notable friendships, he seems to have retained of his childhood was the rather terrible if very chiefly kept up by interchange of letters. splendid figure of his mother, a great Those friendships that date from Bury lady who used to astonish the neighbor- and Cambridge have been given; others hood with her coach and four, and who that followed, to be extinguished only seems to have had a great lady's temper. by death, united him to Alfred TennyHe went to school at Bury St. Edmund's, son and Frederic Tennyson, Carlyle, where he began his long friendships and Carlyle's friend and editor, Norton; with William Donne, who was after Barton, the poet, and Lawrence, the Pollock. Censor of Plays, and with Spedding, the painter; to Sir Frederick editor of "Bacon." It was at Cam- Lowell, two Crabbes, son and grandson bridge that he made the acquaintance of his favorite poet: to Archbishop of Thackeray, who spoke affectionately | Trench, Professor Cowell, who led him of him on his deathbed, and of Thomp- to read Persian, and Mr. Aldis Wright. son, afterwards Master of Trinity, whom he appointed his literary execu FitzGerald's college. He followed no profession after taking his degree. Till tor. It used to be said that a man is 31 known by his friends. If that be so, the world which knows his friends so well has no need of an introduction to FitzGerald. The companion of men like these was certainly no ordinary man, either in heart or head. Nor would it be possible to keep on writing dull letters to such men for forty years. FitzGerald's letters then, we know beforehand, are not dull. In fact, they are among the best in the language, and it is likely enough that they will find more readers than “Omar Khayyam;" though no doubt, but for "Omar Khayyam," we should never have heard of them. Letters show the man, and we have FitzGerald here set out before us, just as he was, in all his kindliness and humor, in all his fine and acute perception of true and false in art and literature, in his love of all that is truly lovable, in his queer ways and whims, even in his weaknesses. A man with his tastes could not write to such men as those to whom his letters went, without often talking of things, books and pictures and music, for instance, that are not likely to be soon forgotten; and of things, too, whose interest is everlasting, the spring and the birds and the sea. On such subjects as these, his letters are full of good sayings, sayings with the personal mark upon them, fresh and worth the utterance, if often in substance very old. Indeed, there is something one would like to quote on almost every page; and it would not be hard to make a large volume of extracts from them, on the Book of Beauties principle, which, detestable as it assuredly would be as a book, would yet contain nothing unworthy of insertion. Hundreds of new books appear every week, and it is for the reviewer to warn the public against those which are not worth reading, and to introduce to the public those which are. But he has a third duty, certainly not less important, to do with regard to old books, one which has been the special delight of all the great critics. He has to call the public back, from time to time, to old friends whom it might otherwise forget. The first duty or the second has been often only a pleasant excuse for the third. Sainte-Beuve will write on a new edition of Molière or La Fontaine, and Matthew Arnold will review a new translation of Marcus Aurelius, not because they want to praise or blame the new edition, but because they want, and want very much, to fetch down Molière and Marcus Aurelius from that upper shelf on which forgetful or ungrateful people are too apt to leave them. So, in this case of Edward FitzGerald, we have a little of two duties to do. Nothing assuredly of the first we spoke of, the business of warning; but something of the second, for there is a new volume of FitzGerald's letters, those to Fanny Kemble, just reprinted from Temple Bar; and, as the third duty, there are the old letters and the old friends, whom the public has known, or ought to have known long ago, to recall to all our memories again. There are a dozen ways in which this might be done. However, in FitzGerald's case, it is not what he did or wrote that we want so much to remember, but what he was. It is as a personality even more than as a poet that we think of him. When we are calling an old friend to mind, the best way of bringing him before us again as he was, is to think of the things he cared most about. So there will be no better way of getting at the living picture of FitzGerald than by hearing him talk of some of the things that gave him most pleasure. And first, of music. There was nothing he cared for more. His taste in it was, like all his tastes, a little oldfashioned, for he preferred melody to harmony and Italian music to German. He was himself always fond of singing, from the Cambridge days when Thackeray and he sang together, to those later on when he would "trudge through the mud" of an evening to Bredfield Vicarage and go through one of Handel's Coronation Anthems with Crabbe, his poet's son. With not a voice among us (as he says); laughable it may seem, yet it is not quite so; the things are so well defined, simple, and grand, that the faintest outline of |